


very near in place and time (but not yet known to me)

by oephelia



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Eventual tenderness, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Not Season/Series 03 Compliant, Post-Season/Series 02, Recreational Drug Use, References to Depression, Slow Burn, Touch-Starved, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-05-20 17:00:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19380958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oephelia/pseuds/oephelia
Summary: It’s been almost half a year since the night at the Byers’ house, since Hargrove beat his face to a pulp, since the dogs and the tunnels and the fire, but there’s something in Steve that’s still (stuck) there in the November darkness, waiting for something big and violent and full of teeth to close the brackets, finish what it started. Sometimes he thinks about the thing the kids called the Mindflayer, bigger and hungrier than the dogs. More often he thinks about Billy Hargrove, stronger than him, hungrier than him. The way Steve could see all his teeth as Hargrove knocked the shit out of him.They haven’t spoken, since.(steve's an unreliable narrator, billy's just unreliable, and the universe is sick and tired of both of them)





	1. lonely & greedy demands (i)

**Author's Note:**

> hello world, this is the post-season two dissociative, touch-starved steve thing that's been brewing in me for a while -- it's for me, mostly, but hopefully at least a few other people too ?
> 
> (i'm on tumblr at [oephelia](https://oephelia.tumblr.com) or [oepheliawrites](https://oepheliawrites.tumblr.com), come talk to me maybe)
> 
> title: from [thirty pieces, by robert barry](https://www.moma.org/collection/works/95459)

Spring comes eventually, stormy-browed and dragging its feet.

Maybe, after everything, it was too much to ask for open skies and fresh air and a new beginning. They’d rung in a new year, and January’s record lows had given way to a sharp-toothed February, which had given way to a gray, wind chafed March. And now it’s April, one day of chilly sunlight to six of torrential rain, and the waiting itches under everyone’s skin — for warmth, for light, to go somewhere, _anywhere_ , that isn’t school or the arcade or their stale-smelling bedrooms.

Steve thinks there’s another kind of waiting, too, that no one wants to be the first to mention.

It calls to him, though, the waiting. It draws him out into the stretched-thin hours before sunrise, hums at the base of his skull like a live power line. Pulls him round the suburbs in lazy loops, cruising slow enough he can count the house numbers, the blank dark windows as they blink past.

Surviving the Upside-Down has worked Hawkins deeper under his skin than a lifetime of living there.

He passes the Hendersons’, set back from the road, porch-lights on tonight, glass doors reflecting ghostly-bright.

Passes the Sinclairs’, where a tricycle has been left in the yard again and, for a second, from a few houses down, maybe — And then Steve’s closer, and the silhouette makes sense of itself, rearranges itself into familiar angles, familiar shapes, handlebars, seat and all.

Reaches the Wheelers’ last, furthest out, end of the road. Nancy’s room is dark, but there’s a glow through the living room curtains that could be Ted, asleep in his recliner in front of the TV or, shaky, shaky, could be her. Awake too, alone too, alone together.

Just for a second, Steve slumps over the wheel, presses his forehead against cool leather. Breathes in. Breathes out. 

He pulls round at the end of the cul-de-sac.

Tomorrow, he’ll be exhausted, again, and Nancy will be concerned, again, and, again, he won’t tell her _why_ because he knows the way she’d look at him if he tried, tired and kind and sorry for him. Eyes bright, fingers wire-tight around his arm, _don’t you think we’d know don’t you think we’d do something Steve you’re not the only one Steve we’re all trying_. He knows. But knowing doesn’t soothe him back to sleep on the nights he wakes up to thick darkness and has to get up, out, into his car, away from his house and the press of trees behind him and the pool-lights, uncanny blue.

Mailboxes become fenceposts, fenceposts become streetlights, dream-slow.

Steve turns off just before downtown Hawkins begins, pulls into the lot in front of the Big Buy, and thinks about describing this to Nancy, watching her forehead crease and her mouth make that little quizzical tilt. Feels, even alone, the need to shake the words off before her face can make him feel stupid. 

It’s the only twenty-four seven convenience store in the Hawkins area, sits alone to burn white-blue through the night, empty except for the night shift cashier. She looks up when the doors slide open, nods at him and he nods back, the doors slide shut, and everything is quiet except for the electrical whir and the sometimes squeak of his sneakers. The air smells flat, a little like cleaning products but mostly like nothing, and the lighting washes everything cold, and there are dozens and dozens of colored boxes with dozens and dozens of logos for dozens and dozens of brands he doesn’t need to pay attention to. It’s the most comforting place Steve knows, or at least the only one that’s still there in the middle of the night, when he really needs it to be.

Except he turns the corner to disappear behind the shelves and there’s Billy Hargrove, blocking the Cheerios.

It’s been almost half a year since the night at the Byers’ house, since Hargrove beat his face to a pulp, since the dogs and the tunnels and the fire, but there’s something in Steve that’s still (stuck) there in the November darkness, waiting for something big and violent and full of teeth to close the brackets, finish what it started. Sometimes he thinks about the thing the kids called the Mindflayer, bigger and hungrier than the dogs. More often he thinks about Billy Hargrove, stronger than him, hungrier than him. The way Steve could see all his teeth as Hargrove knocked the shit out of him.

They haven’t spoken, since. 

Hargrove’s back is to him and he’s humming under his breath, and Steve is momentarily hot from his ears to the tips of his fingers with the urge to scream, or knock him off his feet, or hit him and hit him and not stop hitting him until — or just _run_. The anger-nausea-panic flickers through him in the time it takes to force his mouthful of air out slow, and then it’s gone. He’s left two-dimensional.

“Am I dreaming, or is that you, Hargrove?” he says, and it comes out flat, not much like a question and nothing at all like a joke.

The way Hargrove swings round is _funny_ , or should be, the fact that he’s holding a jar of crunchy peanut butter, objectively the worst kind, the fact that he looks as washed out and greasy under these lights as Steve feels. But Hargrove sets his face and there’s a meanness around his eyes, in the corners of his mouth, that punctures the hysterical, gurgling thing in Steve that wants to laugh. 

“Are you _shitting_ me?” Hargrove says, and that doesn’t sound like a question either.

Steve’s hands are up before he thinks to lift them, palms open.

“I didn’t _know_ you’d be here,” he says, “Can I just —“ and gestures at the cereal, and Hargrove says, “Who’s stopping you?” impassive, unmoving, the whole solid fact of him in Steve’s way.

He’s running his tongue over his teeth like he’s cleansing his palate, licking away the sour taste of surprise, the vulnerability of being caught out. White, white teeth, thick red tongue. Fresh start.

And Steve isn’t wearing socks, is suddenly very aware of being barefoot in his sneakers, of the weird, knobbly paleness of his bare ankles.

“C’mon, man,” he says, “let’s not and say we did.”

“I don’t know,” Hargrove says, slow, “now that we’re here, I think we’re due a _conversation_ , don’t you?”

Steve thinks _fuck off fuck off fuck off_ , thinks _where are all my socks anyway_ , thinks _of all the convenience stores in all the towns in all the world_. Says, “I think our last conversation was enough for me.”

“Don’t be like that.” Like fingers under his chin, tone light but landing solid, pressing Steve’s head up and, now that he’s looking, Hargrove’s smile is nasty. “I still think we could be _friends_ , Harrington, I think we could be _friendly_. Civil. Respectful, even.”

His voice is oil-slick, all iridescent sheen on top and nothing but murk beneath.

Steve’s forehead still itches sometimes, the shiny-pink mark under his hairline, and it itches now, angry. 

“You think?” he says, fingers in his hair, thoughtless, scratching at his scalp. They come away feeling tacky with old product and grease. He shoves both hands in his pockets so Hargrove can’t see him wipe the feeling away. “I think I’m good. Got all the friends I need.”

“Huh. You know, you could give a guy a _complex_ ,” Hargrove says, and he’s clearly starting to pick up momentum, Steve’s gone wrong somewhere, or right. “You’ll stay friends with the ex that fucked around behind your back, you’ll make friends with the guy she fucked around on you _with_ , but you still won’t give me the time of day, now, how d’you think that makes me _feel_?”

“I didn’t realise your feelings were my business, man,” Steve says. “And I _know_ mine are none of yours, so.” 

A shrug, like maybe whatever’s pressing in around him will slip off his shoulders, and he’ll be able to breathe easy again. Hargrove’s smile only tightens.

“Well, see, I think our _business_ got all tangled up when you abducted my kid step-sister, lied to my face about it and then _stole_ my car, and I’ve been real _magnanimous_ about it, bit my tongue all winter, but I think it’s about time we really cleared the air. Made _nice_. You know?”

Mag _nan_ imous, Steve sounds it out in his head, tries not to mouth it back, mag- _nan_ -i-mous, a real fucking ten dollar word. 

He feels like this is a conversation that he should be three-dimensional for.

“This doesn’t sound much like an apology,” he says. 

Hargrove’s smile is so tight it looks plastic.

“You’re fucking _right_ ,” he says. The oil is gone, like Steve’s fumbled a match and now it’s all the flicker-snap of flame. “It’s not an apology. I’m not _sorry_. I didn’t do anything _wrong_.”

Which doesn’t make sense of anything, really.

Steve says so. “Then I’m not sure what you think we have to say to each other?” 

A second, where Steve can hear Hargrove’s breathing, heavy over the steady whir of the lights, the refrigerators. Another.

“I’m _saying_ that —” In. Out. “I’m saying that this is a small fucking pond, and we’re about the biggest fish it has, and wouldn’t it be _easier_ , wouldn’t it be _nicer_ , for _everyone_ if we just settled things?”

Steve wonders whether Hargrove knows how to ask a question without feeding the answer with it, that tone still like a hand on jaw, spooning the words into Steve’s mouth. He can feel them sharp-edged and bitter between his teeth. 

He wants the fight, he’s just missing something that everyone else seems to have when they’re threatened, feels a little broken over it, can take on a pack of dogs with faces that unfurl like carnivorous flowers but can’t hold his own in a fist fight.

He wants to roll over, because he couldn’t breathe through his nose for weeks on end, because Hargrove really fucked him up, because Hargrove’s already _won_ , and if that doesn’t count as a win, if that wasn’t enough, then it’s not going to be over until Steve’s _dead_ , maybe.

Hargrove’s eyes are electric with blueness.

Steve shrugs. Says, “Whatever you want,” and knows that isn’t what Hargrove wants at all, feels a little kick of something solid when those blue, blue eyes narrow.

“ _Seriously_?”

“Seriously. Tell me what you need to hear for this conversation to be over,” Steve says, “and I’ll say it.”

Watches Hargrove’s hands flex at his sides, feels his own clench tighter, symmetrical, in his pockets. Watches Hargrove’s face work, tiny muscle shifts that he doesn’t know how to read.

His fingernails bite into the meat of his palms.

“Are you really this _stupid_?”

“Don’t I look it?” 

Hargrove makes a point of the once-over, holds Steve’s gaze and then scans down, slow, and it’s as off-putting as it was in the showers, like a kick to the ankles when you’re bracing your core for impact. Sort of sleazy, sort of gross, pulled just short of doing damage.

“There’s not enough pretty in the world for that kind of stupid,” he says, and there’s something metallic about it. “You can’t fool me, Harrington, you know that? And you can’t dodge me forever.”

“Maybe,” Steve says, easy. “Maybe not.”

Steve’s life has been teetering between _maybe_ and _maybe not_ for a while now.

And Hargrove just nods, like Steve’s given him something to consider. Waits a few seconds too long, when he could walk away, when it would make more sense to walk away, just waits with the unblinking, intense _deliberate_ -ness that crawls down Steve’s spine, every time. Then, point made, he turns on his heel and goes.

Steve hesitates between Classic and Honey Nut for far longer than he needs, wonders just when exactly everything became such hard _work_. 

~

The next day is Thursday, gray and warmer than it’s been so far, but humid with it. Steve feels clammy, like something from the night before is sticky on his skin, a residue. 

He tunes the radio in his car to static while he drives to school, turns the sound down low so that it stops feeling like noise, something to pay attention to, and becomes a solid thing settling in his ears, over his shoulders, softening everything, blanketing him close.

Has to sit in the car when he gets to school, takes a five that turns into a ten, because he knows the feeling isn’t going to follow him in.

School never used to feel this difficult. But it’s been a weird couple years, and everyone he used to hang out with is exhausting, and Nancy and Jonathan are exhausting too, but in different flavors, and since the tape, since Barb’s funeral, people assume he knows things they don’t, which he does, and look at him the way he used to look at people like Jonathan, like he’s behind glass, which isn’t anything at all like being looked at like he’s King Steve. There’s a breathless sort of inevitability to it all. 

He’s not getting _easy_ back.

And none of it should matter, really, because graduation is just a couple months away, and school is just a few exhausting hours a day to fill up the time before then, but it puts Steve on edge. Makes his skin feel thinner than it ever used to be.

Nancy knocks on the passenger window, and he can feel his heart in his throat, almost chokes on it. 

She’s leaning down to look in at him, one hand braced on the roof, the other holding her books close to her chest, _deja vu, vuja de_ , that feeling he seems to get every time he sees her, like they’re doing something they’ve done before but wrong this time, off-beat.

“The bell,” she says, when he rolls the window down. Then, “You look _awful_.”

Steve kills the engine, gets out, pockets his keys.

He doesn’t really know what to do with her concern now that they’re not dating, now that he can’t reply by touching her. Hand in hers, forehead in the curve between her neck and shoulder, mouth against the soft-rough of her sweater, breathing in her perfume and the smell of the detergent Mrs. Wheeler uses — it makes sense, feels right, is nothing like stumbling through a conversation he doesn’t want to have. Nancy would _understand_ , the way she never quite understands when they talk.

But that’s not something they have, anymore, and she’s looking at him expectantly as he comes round to meet her so he shrugs, smiles. Feels it slide into something crooked and close-mouthed.

“’S no big deal, Nance. Weird night.”

She knocks her shoulder against his, like it’s an okay thing to do, like she doesn’t even have to think about what touching is normal and what isn’t. Everything that isn’t.

Steve’s not angry, hasn’t been angry since _NANCY WHEELER IS A SLUT_ , the vindictive rush of it. Couldn’t find the anger in him when she wouldn’t say she loved him, couldn’t find the anger when she told him what they’d done, her and Jonathan, fidget-awkward and guilty and a little defensive, too. He’s not angry, but it glows in him, hot and low, the feeling that this is easier for her somehow, clear in a way that it isn’t for him. Just another thing that Nancy understands and Steve doesn’t.

The halls are almost clear, and Nancy has homeroom across the building, but she pauses anyway when Steve stops at his locker. Really looks at him while he takes out his History textbook and avoids her eyes.

“We’re going to be okay,” she says, and it falls between statement and question, careful in a way he wishes she wouldn’t be, certain in a way that’s worse. 

He doesn’t answer quick enough, can’t pick apart the _maybe_ from the _maybe not_ , the _how can you know that_ from the _I know that_ , the _fuck off fuck off fuck off_ from the _stay stay stay say it again Nancy don’t stop looking at me_.

She shrugs at him, pats his arm, says, “Don’t skip Chem. again, you have a make up test.” Then “See you at lunch,” as she walks away.

And he’s alone in the hallway, thinking about how she has his schedule memorised, how she sounds a bit like a mom and a lot like she never stopped being his girlfriend, how sad it is that he’ll take what he can get, still. How he doesn’t really have anyone else to try for.

He doesn’t skip. He bombs the test, and knows it. But Nancy asks him at lunch, seems relieved that he was there, that he took it at all, and doing things that make her look at him like that hasn’t stopped mattering to him yet.

Jonathan slips into the chair next to her. He doesn’t sit like Steve used to, arm draped across the back of her chair, pressed into her side, picking at her food when she took too long to eat it; he’s almost obnoxiously thoughtful about her space, carefully, consciously, constantly _not_ crowding her. But Steve can see the way they mirror each other, sees them leaning in at the same time, notices every absent, fluttering point of contact.

Knows they don’t mean to shut him out.

Knows, just as sure, that there will never be quite enough space for him whenever the two of them are together.

“— Steve?”

He’s putting fries in his mouth but they don’t taste of much.

“Steve?”

Jonathan’s creased brow is the twin to Nancy’s, and he’s reaching across the table as though he was going to touch Steve, shake him maybe, or just brush his arm. Steve looks at where his hand has paused on the tabletop and Jonathan pulls it back quickly, looks apologetic even though Steve didn’t _say_ anything, wasn’t _going_ to say anything, was just _looking_.

“Yeah,” Steve says, blinking. “Sorry.”

Jonathan doesn’t have a monopoly on being sorry for stupid, meaningless things.

“No worries, man, it’s just, we were just saying — the kids have a campaign night planned for this weekend at Nance’s, and we were thinking” — Jonathan glances over at Nancy, and their we-ness is so complete, so effortless that Steve wants to scream — “we were thinking, I’m driving Will over anyway, maybe we could all hang out? The three of us?”

Steve thinks maybe there’s a dot Jonathan’s missing, how _I’m driving Will over anyway_ becomes _the three of us_. The Steve dot, the dot that says, _we know you don’t have anyone else we know you don’t have anything else we’re too good to just let that be your problem we’re too kind not to try we’re too guilty about what we did oh Steve it must be so lonely_. 

Neither of them ever connect the dots aloud, but Steve hears it every time.

And he'd talked to Billy Hargrove last night, doesn’t even know why except that once he’d started it hadn’t really felt possible to just stop, hadn’t really enjoyed it but thinks he didn’t hate it much more than he hates this, right now, and all those thoughts put together sound like the loneliest thing he’s ever heard. 

So maybe they’re right.

The urge to say no anyway is so strong that, for a second, he just shreds a fry into little finger-squished pieces and drops them onto the tray like a sulky kid.

“I’ll check my diary,” he says, eventually, and Nancy rolls her eyes and smiles at him, pretends he’s being funny. Licks the oil and salt from his fingertips so he doesn’t have to say anything else.

There’s a lull for a few minutes, while Nancy finally gets round to her food, and when the conversation picks up again, it’s all college, about taking the SAT in May, about NYU and early application and scholarships. Nancy’s had a meeting with the guidance counselor, who says — and Jonathan’s been talking to his boss about taking on some more responsibility over the summer to help cover the cost of the — and Steve listens for a while, until he realises he isn’t listening at all, is so absorbed in paying attention to them that he’s stopped making sense of the words.

They look at him almost as much as they look at each other, they include him by just assuming he’s _there_ with them. He feels very transparent anyway.

He didn’t meet the early application deadline, thought about sending the same draft he’d shown Nance out for the regular deadline, and then decided that, without anything close to an essay, without anywhere he wanted to go, without anything he’d be any good at studying for four years, then the whole process was for shit.

Out of everything that’s happened since Halloween, he thinks that’s the thing he regrets least, the one thing he maybe wouldn’t change. At least, during the day time. At least, when he’s not driving in circles late at night and thinking _god maybe I’ll never get out of here_.

Nancy's mouth is moving and her eyes are wide and he’s remembering the way she’d read that essay, trying to coax the sense out of it, the gentle, encouraging, teacherly way she’d told him what it needed. He thinks Jonathan would never want that from her, would never need it.

They speak the same language.

There’s still maybe ten minutes before the bell for next period, but what’s left of Steve’s lunch is cold and he wants out, out, out. Fresh air to clear away some of the everything he feels.

“I’m just gonna,” he says, trails off, gestures through the windows out at the parking lot.

Jonathan nods like it’s a complete sentence, and Steve pushes away from the table, picks up his tray to dump it.

When he glances back on his way out, Nancy’s chewing on her bottom lip, and Jonathan is speaking, and they both look sort of sad, sort of serious, his hand coming up to rest over hers on the table between them.

 _Solemn_ , Steve thinks. _That’s the word_.

~

Steve’s parents call Friday, after school; he comes home to the phone mid-ring, shrill and loud in all the quiet of an empty house, and he knows it’s them. When his dad’s away, no one else rings the home line.

He’s standing on the threshold, knows that he could, so easily, just turn around and close the door on the noise and they probably wouldn’t try again, not until next week, and it would be one less _thing_. He’s standing and the phone keeps ringing, insistent.

He goes in, leaves the door open behind him. His dad’s voice, when he picks up, is irritated, _about time Steven_ and all the rest, and he nods along even though no one can see. Says, “sorry, Dad,” and, “I know, Dad,” at what are probably not quite the right times. Thinks his dad isn’t even all that annoyed, not really, just doesn’t have anything else to say to him.

“How’s Washington?”

“Wet,” his dad says, “and busy. How’s school?”

“Okay. You know, normal.”

“Hmm.” It’s hard to tell whether his dad is waiting for him to elaborate, or making one of the almost involuntary noises he uses to fill gaps in conversation. “Staying out of trouble?”

“I guess,” Steve says, which is mostly true. 

He gets detention every couple weeks for skipping class, but he never spends those missed hours doing anything more disruptive than smoking in the recess where the gym meets the main school building. Mostly he just lies on the bleachers till his face is numb with cold, or sits alone in the back of the library, out of the librarian’s sight. He’s out of anyone’s way. It’s the opposite of trouble.

“Hmm,” sceptical this time. Steve waits him out. “You’re graduating either way, I suppose. D’you want to speak to your mother?”

Steve doesn’t, but he can hear his dad passing over the phone anyway, and then his mom, sounding breathless and fussy, saying, “Steve! Baby, we miss you so much.”

And he starts replying, wants to say, “Yeah, mom, I miss you too,” but she’s already moved on.

“It’s so good to hear your _voice_ , baby, I’m so glad you’re okay. You know we love you — and give my love to Nancy, too, won’t you, hon? And say hello to her parents from me? I feel just awful about how long it’s been since our last dinner, such nice people, but there’s so much up in the air right now, you know, or we would —”

He’s never been able to find a word for the kind of small his mom makes him feel, childish and unreal. He knows he’d told her that Nance and he’d broken up, he _knows_ it happened, but she just hadn’t heard, or hadn’t remembered, or hadn’t wanted to change the script, and it’s not _worth_ trying again today, over the phone.

Won’t be worth trying again later, either, in person, but he’ll do it anyway.

Now, though, he says, “Yeah, of course, mom, will do. Love you too,” instead of any of the sharp-edged, brittle things that sting at the back of his throat, press behind his eyes, and she makes a little cooing noise into the phone, like he’s sweet and impressive and dear to her, says “kisses, kisses, baby,” and hangs up.

It takes him a second to put the phone back down, at a weird delay from himself, goes to the open door and sits down on his front step.

It’s not really evening yet but everything feels darker, the sky lower, closer, so heavy with unshed rain that it feels like having someone breathing moist and warm on the back of his neck. He pulls his legs up to his chest, rests his forehead on his knees and just. Stays like that, while the world creeps darker and smaller around him, until the rain comes.

~

The Wheelers’ house is warm-bright and loud when Steve arrives on Saturday night. 

In the kitchen, Mike’s talking, loud and tripping-fast. Only Will seems to be really listening to him — Dustin, Max and Lucas too busy with another, overlapping conversation that’s either a few minutes behind or a few minutes ahead — and even he looks away when Nancy reappears with Steve, gives Steve a glance, a smile. 

His expressions are sort of _quiet_ , like he’s tiptoeing around inside his own body, which is creepy, or sad, or maybe both, and too much of either for Steve to linger on him too long, the weird, mirror-quality of his face and his wet-dark eyes.

He smiles back, says, “Hey, guys,” over the noise, and aims both, secretly, at Will in particular.

Jonathan is sitting on the counter across the room, gangly-looking and hunch-shouldered next to the Wheelers’ gleaming refrigerator. He looks wrong there, more wrong than Steve has ever looked, in this house, in any house, but less wrong, maybe, than Steve _feels_ , and it doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t matter, he has beer and he’s patting the open counter on his other side.

Says, loud, “There’s more in the fridge, if you want?”

Steve does want. He wants beer, and he wants Nancy, and he wants to be in this kitchen together like none of them have ever seen or done or felt anything awful. 

(For all that Nancy couldn’t stand _pretending_ when they were together, he thinks she’s not so bad at it now.)

He brushes past the kids, drops one hand heavy into Dustin’s hair as he passes just to hear him squawk, and when he gets to Jonathan, Nancy’s next to him, opening the fridge, grabbing two beers.

“Your mom alright with this?” Steve says, as she hands one to him, not-quite-cold.

There’s a look, this firm-jawed, sharp-eyed Nancy look she used to give him whenever he prodded her, dared her, teased her, and it settles into the lines of her face so easy it’s like nothing’s changed, not really. 

He wants to kiss the crease between her brows, the smile lines that never quite disappear, even when her mouth is set tight and hard. Hates how much he wants it. Feels itchy with jealousy that Jonathan could be thinking the same thing, and that he gets to do it. 

Even though it’s been months. Even though they’re all mostly friends. Even though.

“She’s too wrapped up in her own suburban _psychodrama_ to care,” she says, and there’s a too-loud crack of carbonation. “This is _whatever_.”

 _Psychodrama_ , Steve thinks. That’s a new one. 

Maybe he wasn’t too far off when he called himself a shitty boyfriend, because he doesn’t know, has never known, the right things to say to her, the things she really wants, wanted, him to say. Can only sort of shrug in the face of her hurt, her anger, her whatever-this-is, because what does he know about healthy marriages or happy homes, really. 

And he doesn’t really get the way Nancy is about her parents, because maybe Mrs. Wheeler is a casserole-giving, blowout-getting, aerobics-going housewife, and maybe she isn’t _emotionally fulfilled_ , or whatever, but Steve likes her, thinks she’s warm and bossy and the first person that comes to mind when he thinks of a _mom_.

“Guess we all get a night off, then,” Jonathan says, soft and diplomatic. 

Steve thinks, a night off _what_ , but doesn’t say it, just touches his can to Jonathan’s and nods when he says, “To catching a break.”

Solemn.

They drink to it, keep drinking till they hit bottom. New beers, still not-quite-cold, toast the fact that the kids have taken their noisy bullshit downstairs, drink. Starting to feel a little soft at the edges, they toast their friendship, drink.

Things are easy after that, easy in the way that things get when he’s not drunk but he’s past sober, and he forgets to think about things like _we know you don’t have anyone else_ and _stop looking at me don’t stop looking at me_ and _kisses kisses baby_ and _you can’t dodge me forever_. 

He’s on the counter, knee jostling Jonathan’s, and then he’s in the bathroom, combing damp fingers through his hair and avoiding his reflection, and then they’re out in the yard, lying side by side in the short scrubby grass next to the power lines that run alongside, where the hum seems to sit in the air and settle in the ground underneath them.

It’s not quite thick-dark yet, but the sky is fading from twilight-purple to blue-black, and the stars are coming out.

“’S weird,” Steve says, to no one in particular.

“Yeah,” Nancy sighs, soft, and then, “what is?”

“What isn’t?” Jonathan says, when Steve doesn’t seem to have an answer. “It’s all weird, now, all the time.”

And Steve isn’t sure whether Jonathan feels it the same way he does, the waiting, the dreams, the teeth, all of it, or whether his world is full of other, equally bad or maybe worse weirdnesses but this feels true and right. He nods, eyes full of stars.

“I wish,” says Nancy, and it hangs there shivering in the air for a moment before she picks up the thought. “I wish we didn’t _know_ that. I wish we thought everything was weird, but in a normal, like, _adolescent_ way. You know?”

Steve thinks, _yes yes yes_.

Jonathan says, “I wish I _didn’t_ ,” like it’s a game, to turn the words back on her, but also like he absolutely means it.

“I wish it was summer already,” Steve says, testing it out, knowing it sounds paper-thin. 

He wishes it was summer because he thinks that maybe, without school, he’ll be able to catch his breath. Because there’ll be sun and warm nights that stay light for longer and leaves on the whispering trees and fewer shadows behind his house. Because there’ll be endless excuses to be away from home. Because summer feels like an affirmation, every year, of being real, alive, really alive, and he’s been _maybe, maybe not_ for so long. Because then the _waiting_ , at least one, onion-skin layer of it, will be over.

He thinks about following up, saying all that, but then he imagines saying, “you know?” and seeing that they don’t, not quite, that he’s said the words but they don’t mean as much outside his head. Thinks that would only make things worse.

“Me too,” says Nancy, and she sounds wistful enough that Steve thinks maybe she does get it, or part of it. Then, lighter, “And I wish I had a cigarette.”

“You don’t _smoke_ ,” Steve says, rolling over and propping himself up on his elbow to look at her, feeling sort of syrup-slow. “You shouldn’t waste wishes.”

But he reaches into his jacket pocket anyway, offers his almost-empty pack to her and then to Jonathan, takes the last for himself. Passes over his Zippo once he’s lit up, watches the way the flame flickers into being and leaves behind glowing dots in the semi-darkness, an exclamation point at first Nancy’s mouth, and then Jonathan’s.

“Thanks,” she murmurs, a little delayed, tucks the lighter back into his hand, and her fingers are colder than his, send a little shoot of feeling across his palm.

They smoke and don’t speak, as though the conversation they’d almost had, the dark hungry thing at its middle, is still tugging at them, trying to pull them back into saying things out loud. Her cigarette is only half finished when Nancy grinds it out in the dirt, says she’s going in to get another drink, disappears into the warm yellow of the house.

Steve doesn’t remember finishing the can beside him, but it’s empty, so he crushes it under the heel of his hand.

Jonathan’s watching him, he thinks, but he doesn’t speak so neither does Steve, a blink, long and sticky-eyed, and then Nancy is back and they’re toasting something else, to the stars, to the bigness of the sky, to summer coming eventually.

~

The darkness seems to happen all of a sudden, like between an inhale and an exhale the last of the light has been sucked away.

Beside Steve, so close that he feels the air move a little, Nancy shivers, interrupts herself halfway through a thought.

“Think I need a change of scene,” she says, pushing herself up, and Jonathan is following her lead, collecting up empty cans and cigarette butts because, even beer-mellowed, he’s so _conscientious_ , so _careful_. So willing to clean up a mess.

Steve squeezes his eyes closed, though it’s too dark to make out more than the shapes of them, shakes his head when one of them says, “Steve?”

“Just a few more minutes.”

“Don’t freeze to death,” Nancy says, with a sort of fondness that almost aches in him, and for a second he expects to feel her hand in his hair, waits for her to press a kiss to his forehead. Hears the front door close behind them before he remembers why she wouldn’t, why she won't. Shaky shaky shaky.

Alone, he feels less drunk, or maybe just less warm.

When he lies back down, the stars are overwhelming, the whole sky pressing downwards and inwards and downwards and inwards around him. He closes his eyes again, shuts out everything but the electrical thrum, but closed eyes alone feel more dangerous than closed eyes together, and the darkness feels full of presence behind his eyelids. Things are crumbling, easy, glad, forgetful into _wrong wrong wrong_.

At least it’s familiar.

He doesn’t want to go back inside, where Mrs. Wheeler will probably have come downstairs by now to fuss over sleeping arrangements for the kids, will stop him with a gentle hand in the crook of his arm to ask about his parents and the house and whether he’s been eating enough, and make the face that says _it’s such a shame we never see you round the house anymore it’s such a shame you and Nancy couldn’t make things work_. Where Nancy and Jonathan will pull away from each other as he comes in because he’s so painfully, disgustingly transparent, of course they know what it does to him to see them shoulder to shoulder, eyes for each other, as though a bit of distance will change what they all know.

But he can’t bear to stay in the dark either.

He wobbles slightly getting to his feet, walks into the puddle of light under the front door lamps, looks out at the quiet of suburban Hawkins settling into sleep.

Then, startle-loud in the ambient noise, the sound of a car pulling down Maple, a grumble that lodges somewhere in Steve’s gut. Headlights burning towards him. The groan of tires when the car, Billy Hargrove’s car, Steve _knows _that engine, brakes outside the Wheelers’ house.__

____

____

Hargrove lays on the horn.

_You can’t dodge me forever._

It’s too dark for Steve to make out more than the shape of him at the wheel, but he knows that Hargrove can see him, lit up bright and alone and conspicuous. Feels the confusing burn of anger-nausea-panic, and shame too, like he’s been caught somewhere he shouldn’t be, or maybe, like drinking all evening on an empty stomach is catching up with him all at once.

Watches the Camaro’s lights shut off, the driver’s side door open.

Watches him cross the yard.

He stops just out of reach. There’s an unlit cigarette dangling from his slightly open mouth, and he’s rubbing at his knuckles absentmindedly, not like they hurt, more like his hands are just _there_ and he’s not sure what to do with them. 

“Where the fuck’s Max?”

“Inside,” Steve says, “they’re all inside, she’ll probably be out any second.”

His tongue feels thick in his mouth and the words come out a little blurry.

Hargrove says, “Are you _drunk_ , Harrington?”

And Steve thinks, yes, says, “No, fuck off.” Pauses. “It’s Saturday night.”

Thinks maybe his point is unclear, but doesn’t really want to bridge the gap.

“Right,” Hargrove says, sort of slow, glances over Steve’s shoulder at the still-closed door. “Not sure whether it’s sadder that you’re such good _buddies_ with kids _half_ your _age_ , or that they’ve left you out here to get drunk on your own.”

“They’re, like, thirteen,” Steve says, “Fuck _off_.” 

“Right,” Hargrove repeats, even slower, shaking his head. Then, “you got a light?”

Steve’s reaching into his pocket before he catches up with himself, pulling out his lighter, and he could say no, still, could make a point of it, but it feels like a point that wouldn’t be much worth making. So he tosses it into Hargrove’s waiting hands, watches him flick it open and light his cigarette the same way he’d watched Jonathan and Nancy.

A sudden rush of warmth and sound at his back, and Max calling, “Thanks for having me, Mrs. Wheeler,” over her shoulder in that awkward, rushed way that kids talk to other kids’ parents, closing the door on Mrs. Wheeler’s reply.

“About fucking time, Maxine,” Hargrove says, exhaling smoke that curls into the light.

“What the _hell_ , Billy,” matching his anger so quickly that Steve feels a little off-balance-dizzy. “You could’ve _waited_ in the _car_ , I was only, like. Five minutes.”

She shoves past him, doesn’t even acknowledge Steve, all tight shoulders and tight jaw.

He calls, “Bye, Max,” to her back, like an asshole, and Hargrove says, low, “You need to keep your nose out of it.”

Doesn’t have to exert himself to make it sound threatening, to have the upper hand.

That should be it, but it isn’t. 

Instead, Hargrove’s taking the cigarette from between his lips and reaching out, hand flipped, to place it between Steve’s, fingers never actually touching him but too close, invasive, weird, gross, horribly intimate, intimately horrible. And Steve closes his mouth round it, holds it there so that Hargrove will let go, pull his hand back, stop being so _close_ to his face.

He can taste cinnamon gum. 

“I’ll be seeing you,” Hargrove says, pokerfaced, and shoves both hands into his jeans pockets.

It’s only after the Camaro has peeled away that Steve realises Hargrove’s pocketed his lighter too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> leave me yr thoughts here or on tumblr or on tiny pieces of paper scattered to the wind, please ?
> 
> chapter title: from sufjan steven's _john my beloved_


	2. lonely & greedy demands (ii)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (cw for emetophobia & description of a panic attack in this chapter)

Steve sleeps through most of Sunday, dreamless, colorless sleep. Wakes up in the late afternoon, still most of the way to tired, heavy-headed and cotton-mouthed, in the clothes he’d worn the day before. It’s raining again, fat drops falling with real force so that they sound solid. Percussive. From his window, he watches the concrete around the pool washed slick, the surface of the water pockmarked. 

When he goes downstairs, it’s later still, he’s showered and changed and tastes like toothpaste instead of stale smoke and sleep spit, but nothing feels any clearer.

He eats fistfuls of cereal straight from the box.

There’s nothing better to do.

The missing lighter bothers him, though, that night and the next day, like a loose tooth. He’s almost certain he’ll never see it again. Hargrove seems the kind of person to keep something that’s obviously of no real value but that Steve might conceivably want to have back, because it’s useful, because it’s _his_. 

Monday night, when he wakes up from dreams of tunnels and fire and something that looks like Billy Hargrove but whose face opens into rings of white teeth, he buys a pack of disposable plastic BICs alongside his milk, like a resolution not to think about it anymore.

He still wants it back the next day, and the next.

Midnight Wednesday, he wakes again from the same dreams, a perfect image-for-image repeat, and they’re somehow worse now that he knows what to expect. He throws up in the sink, drinks three glasses of water, one two three, to soothe the burn in his throat. Throws up again.

His sleepless nights aren’t usually clustered so close, and it feels, stupidly, irrationally, like Hargrove is _doing_ this to him, like he knows, like he’s burrowing into Steve’s head and making himself comfortable there, rubbing shoulders, trading faces with monsters. Steve can’t stand it, his body can’t stand it, his whatever-of-a-brain can’t stand it.

In the mirror, his skin looks almost gray, eyes wide, lips tight. A face that’s his, has to be his, but seems insubstantial. An impression, a reflection of a reflection, twice removed from what he thinks he really looks like.

He spits one last time into the sink, acidic, thick. Brushes the taste away, brushes so hard he makes his gums bleed. Tries not to think about the mess he’s making in the pipes, the bloody toothpaste foam and stomach acid and mostly-digested cafeteria food. His hands are shaking, and the backs of his knees want to crumple. He drinks another glass of water, slow this time, and swallows it all down.

When he can stand up straight, sees less fuzz behind his eyes, feels less like the emergency glass around his joints has been punched out, he leaves, starts his car. 

The air tastes like nighttime and damp, the houses, the same houses in the same order, look tidied up and squared away like dollhouses at the end of the day. He’s getting further and further away from his bed, and the dreams caught in the sweat-creases of it. Big Buy glows, grows closer, blue-white and safe. 

He’s jittery and turned inside out; he wants Pepto-Bismol and orange juice, like a kid with a stomach bug.

The cashier’s reading under the counter tonight, doesn’t look up when the doors sigh open and then closed again. The fluorescent bar directly above her is flickering slightly, and Steve, blinking pink, blue, yellow, nightmare-primed, hesitates. Pinches the skin of his wrist between fingers cold from driving with both windows down. She sighs, turns a page, and the light settles back into a steady glow, and the thin skin over the nub of Steve’s wrist bone stings.

This is a place where nothing will ever happen, Steve thinks, and believes it.

He finds Pepto-Bismol and orange juice. Isn’t ready to leave. Thinks maybe he should get some food. Stands, safe, in front of the bread, shelves and shelves of it, enough choices that he can take his time. Is sort of lost in the nothingness of it when he hears someone come in, rubber soles on flooring. 

His first thought is _Hargrove_ , and it shivers up and down his spine, runs fingernails over the jagged, splintering places where his kneecaps and elbows should be.

It isn’t. 

It’s Chief Hopper, pausing at the end of the aisle, looking strained at the seams with his thumbs tucked into his belt loops and his shoulders bullish. 

“Harrington?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, slow, and his voice scratches at the rawness in his throat. Holds up the garish pink bottle in one hand, the carton of juice in the other, a justification.

“Rough night,” Hopper says, pitched like he’s agreeing with something Steve doesn’t think he’d said. There’s something about his tone, the tilt of his mouth, that makes Steve feel as though he’s being laughed at, like Hopper sees right through him, like everything he says is a sort of gentle elbow to the ribs. “Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

Steve makes a noise not even he can decipher. Hopper squints at him.

“You know what? Never mind,” he says. “I’ve seen corpses that look more rested, take a sick day on me.”

“Right,” Steve says.

“Take two,” Hopper says, deliberate, as though Steve had interrupted. 

“Right,” Steve says, again, “uh. Thanks, Chief.”

It’s an out, but Hopper lingers, like there’s something else to say. Steve feels sure there isn’t. He doesn’t know Hopper very well, tries to make a point of not getting into situations where they might have to get more closely acquainted, and he’s not doing anything wrong. He waits for Hopper’s gaze to slide off him and away. Instead, his eyes prickle at Steve’s face, inquisitive.

“Seriously, kid,” he says, gruff, and it’s somewhere between a cuff on the ear and a hand on the shoulder. He isn’t anyone to Steve, and Steve isn’t anyone to him. “Get on home and get some sleep.”

“Yessir,” Steve says, flat, and Hopper breathes out hard through his nose, like he’d laugh, maybe, if it wasn’t so late.

“Alright, alright,” shrugging, backing off, rocking back on his heels, all too familiar. “I’ll see you around,” which isn’t quite, “I’ll be seeing you,” a missed step, Hopper’s forgotten his line, or Steve has.

_Not if I see you first._

He doesn’t buy bread after all, takes himself home to complete silence and only the light in his bathroom left on, swallows two capfuls of Pepto-Bismol that leave the inside of his mouth sweet-bitter and chalky, and passes out.

~

It’s Thursday again, and Steve skips all his morning classes to watch the hour hand of the library clock slide round and round. Counts the times the hands meet, once, twice, three times, can see the fourth coming when the librarian taps him on the shoulder. Lunch is halfway over, and he’d forgotten that the clock had anything to do with time at all.

“You know, you really can’t stay here all day, young man,” she says when he turns, and sounds very sorry to have to say it. Soft, and conspiratorial, and breath-mint-mothball-lavender kind, eyes blown big behind bottle cap lenses. Another missed step feeling, a lurch in his stomach that jars in his limbs. He hadn’t stolen those hours from anyone, she’d just let him take them. He wonders how sick he must still look for her to have left him alone for so long.

“Sorry,” he murmurs. Then, “thank you.”

“The guidance counsellor’s office is just round the corner,” she says when he looks away for his backpack. 

There’s an answer, not the one he’d wanted — not sick, just crazy. 

He nods, and smiles, and leaves, can’t get out from under her eyes quick enough. 

Every minute he hadn’t felt passing is now scratching, grit-like, at his stomach, his lungs, between his ribs, under the soft ticklish skin of his armpits and the soles of his feet. He’s too restless to go to the cafeteria, and sit, watch, listen, pick at his food. He heads to his locker instead, hadn’t picked up his textbooks when he’d arrived, thinks that along the way maybe he’ll figure out what’s supposed to come next. How he’s meant to put the rest of his day back together.

It feels like a strange, horrible joke when he sees Hargrove waiting for him.

He’s leaning against what he must know is the door of Steve’s locker, lazy-shouldered and hard-eyed. Steve should’ve taken Hopper’s advice, called in sick and swallowed back all those hours at home, trying and failing to sleep in the thin daylight. The scratching rises to the roof of his mouth, behind his eyes, the skin along his jaw and stretched over his throat.

“You’re a hard guy to find,” Hargrove says. “Been avoiding me?”

“Didn’t know you were looking,” Steve says, honestly. Thinks he would have done a far better job of not being found if he had known.

“It’s a small town,” Hargrove says, “and a smaller fucking school. I shouldn’t _have_ to look.”

He’s playing with the ring on his middle finger, like Steve isn’t worth his full attention, like his hands aren’t listening to what his mouth is saying, like they’re punctuating an entirely different conversation. 

That ring caught on Steve’s jacket while Hargrove held him still. Steve knows what that ring feels like on impact, the dull sting of it. It’s hard to focus.

“What do you want, Hargrove?”

“I have something of yours,” he says, twists the ring all the way off, slides it back into place. “Thought you might like it back.”

A pause. Round and round the ring goes.

“So you came all the way to my locker in your lunch period to do me a favor?” Steve asks, feeling real brittle about it. “You’re _sweet_.”

“I can be,” Hargrove says and teases it out. “I can be real chivalrous.”

It’s a slippery, rustling word, silvery as his ring, soft as his voice. Shh, vuh, russ. It goes down easy. Steve imagines circling it in pencil.

“The thing is, you’ve kept me waiting, haven’t you, and I’ve had a chance to _think_. And now I’m not feeling so inclined to do you a _favor_.”

Steve hates him, slow gold fingers and slow gold voice, blinking silver band. Hates himself more, for not saying, _well when you put it like that_ , for not having said, _keep it_ , earlier, _it’s all yours_ or _it’s nothing I’ve missed_ or something that says what Hargrove’s hands say, _it doesn’t matter_. Hates that he’s never serious enough when Hargrove is, and too serious when Hargrove isn’t.

“Alright,” and it comes out heavy, “so what do you want?”

Eyes off his now-still hands, up to his face.

Hargrove’s eyes are waiting for him there, flat and blue. 

“I want you to owe me.”

Steve’s back teeth are aching with the tightness of his jaw, the pressure of biting down, against the scratching scratching scratching. 

“What?”

“I want you to _owe_ me.” 

“Owe you _what_?” 

Hargrove’s face is very still.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

It’s two rows of straight white teeth, ready to snap shut. It’s the second between dreading and _knowing_ you’ve triggered a bear trap. Steve would have to be stupid to say yes.

“It’s a one-time offer,” Hargrove says, like a nudge.

Except that, really, there’s no difference between saying no (knowing that Hargrove will find him again, another day, another something, another almost-not-quite-deferred-til-next-time threat) and saying yes (knowing that it gives Hargrove a reason to find him again, another day, another something, another almost-not-quite-deferred-til-next-time threat) except that saying yes leaves him with his lighter, and more _maybe_ than _maybe not_. 

And Hargrove has no idea how stupid Steve can be.

“Do you get off on this?” 

“Take it or leave it.”

So Steve says, “fuck _you_ ,” holds out his hand, which is as much of an answer as he wants to give. 

Hargrove looks at it, then back at him, says, “Use your big boy words,” in this _voice_ , the one he probably uses on girls, coaxing and warm and honey-sweet. 

And Steve says, stupid stupid stupid with it, “ _please_ ,” watches Hargrove’s hand disappear into his back pocket and pull out his Zippo, small, silver, vitally important. Thinks maybe he’ll do what Steve did to Jonathan, what bigger kids do to smaller ones’ toys, drop it before it’s in his hands just to watch him kneel and scramble for it.

Instead, Hargrove reaches out and slips it into the breast pocket of his jacket, close enough that Steve can feel how hot his palm is, can feel the brush of his fingers through the denim as he pulls them away, now empty.

“You should take better care of your things,” he says, and it’s light and casual and still just a little sweet. Walks away, and Steve is left — just left.

The lighter, when he takes it out, is still warm to the touch.

~

He buys a new pack of smokes on the drive home, and by lunch the next day is more than halfway to being out again, has never felt so much like he’s going to shake his way out of his skin. Nancy finds him in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of his car, ashing into a half-full can of Coke. Her eyes and mouth are gray with something between disappointment and disbelief.

“ _Seriously_?” she says, and Steve thinks that’s fair.

“In my defence,” he starts, loses momentum. Shrugs. “Yeah, no. I dunno.”

She settles beside him, leans back on her palms the way he is, and Steve looks down at their hands side by side. The strange mountainous topography of tendons, the rough red that tips her fingers, kept cold by awful circulation, the blunt squareness, the blockiness of his. How close they are, how easy it would be to stretch out his pinky, brush against hers. It’s so possible it almost feels like he’s done it.

“My mom asked me to invite you to dinner tonight,” she says, eventually, like she’s already started and discarded a few other conversations in the silence, and this is the one she's decided is worth having. Her eyes skip across parked cars before meeting his again. “I think she worries about you.”

And he can almost hear Mrs. Wheeler’s voice in Nancy’s, _oh Steve you know you’re always welcome here really any time_ , so earnest that he can almost believe letting her feed him would be doing her a favor, smiling the bashful-eyed, neatly-tucked-corner smile that Nancy’s inherited. It makes him queasy and he’s not sure why.

“I think she thinks you’re lonely,” Nancy says, and there’s a little push in her voice, against the edges of Steve’s quiet. “You know. Because of your parents? And everything else.”

Everything else could mean Tommy and Carol, or her, or Jonathan, or Jonathan and her together. Everything else could mean anything else. It feels rude to ask.

“You’d say, wouldn’t you?” And there’s real concern there, but it feels like cold fingers pressing at tender skin, clinical and a little too precise. “You’d tell us if there was something wrong?”

It’s maybe the tone of it, the not-really-questions, that hurts, or maybe it’s the _us_ , like she’s never going to be alone with him again.

He leaves a gap, hopes it’s long enough to convince her he’s thought about the answer, is being _careful_ and _serious_ , like they’re on the same page of the same book and this is a conversation as possible as his little finger on hers.

“Sure, Nance.”

_The thing is everything keeps happening_ , he thinks, _the thing is I feel like I got left behind and everything keeps happening and I’m not here yet the thing is nothing’s wrong I’m just stuck and I’m not sure what’ll fix it if anything’ll fix it the thing is the thing is the thing is I don’t know what the thing is I just want the waiting for it to be over._

And even in his head the words don’t say what he means. They tie themselves in knots as he orders and re-orders them, until they’re too tangled to pick apart. He stares up at the sky, the clouds that are more green than gray.

Nancy nods, the kind of nod that’s not-quite-final, a comma, room to breathe, and not a period.

“That’s what I told her,” she says. “That you’d tell us, if you needed to? That things were probably okay. Would be okay.”

Steve thinks about the bathroom at Halloween, the way she’d looked right through him and said, _bullshit_ , and knows it would be cruel to do the same here, now, sober. But he thinks it, viciously, thinks, _bullshit bullshit no YOU YOU’RE bullshit_.

Resents her for not knowing what he’s thinking and resents her for wanting to know.

Loves her too, helplessly.

“I know,” he says, and has never known a single thing in his entire life.

“You’ll come, then?”

Home means cold floors and cold cereal and waking up cold in front of the TV.

“Anything for your mom,” he says. He knows it’ll make her roll her eyes and huff at him, and she does, and something flickers in her that might be _you’re an idiot Steve Harrington_. He sees it form and then dissolve.

“Good,” she says instead, decisive. “Six, then?”

~

He doesn’t mean to be early.

He’d dawdled in the shower, changed between shirts in seven shades of blue, stared out at the impassive twilit sky until his eyes ached. Time never seems to move the way he asks it to.

It’s Mrs. Wheeler that opens the door, and she looks the way she always looks, neat, smiling, a little tired in the corners of her eyes and her slackening curls, but glad to see him. It’s a well-practiced, well-worn look.

“You’re here,” she says, ushering him inside. Steve breathes in the smile and the smell of Italian herbs and tomato. Feels more solid. “Nancy’s in her room, and the boys are all downstairs, if you want to say hello?”

He doesn’t, really.

“I could give you a hand in the kitchen first, Mrs. Wheeler?”

It’s a habit, and that’s well-practiced, well-worn, too. 

Mrs. Wheeler looks back at him from the end of the hall, says, “Oh, would you? I could use a spare pair of hands with the salad.”

Then, an afterthought, “It’s _Karen_ , Steve,” the way she always says it, with a smile in her voice, because it’s been two years and Steve has never once called her anything but Mrs. Wheeler.

Holly’s sitting at the dining table, coloring with a kind of frenetic energy. She doesn’t look up when he says hello, not until Mrs. Wheeler says, “Holly, baby, we have a _guest_ ,” and Holly grunts down at the yellow sun pressed so hard into the paper it shines, waxy bright. She’s too old, now, to tolerate Steve playing peekaboo, pulling faces at her across the room. But with his back to her, and Mrs. Wheeler turned away at the fridge, nothing’s changed.

It’s the first few months of dating Nancy again, when her parents thought he was a bad influence, and Steve and Nancy were both still reeling drunk with how much bigger and scarier and worse their world had become, and he’d been stupid, mad, head over heels for her, certain he didn’t deserve her but somehow had her anyway. He’d wanted her parents to like him, and he’d wanted them all to like him and not stop liking him, and he’d wanted to be charming and useful and considerate and indispensable.

It’s the honeymoon year in between one fall and another, a year of beginning to feel less like he was playing at being useful and more like he was actually being useful. 

The radio is playing something jazzy and indistinct, and he’s shredding the head of lettuce Mrs. Wheeler gives him, chopping tomatoes, mixing dressing, and for the time it takes to get to the end of the track, nothing has changed. He’ll be dating Nancy until they're married, and this’ll be the home his parents’ house has never been, and he can be content, doing nothing else, nothing but this forever.

It doesn’t last. It was never going to. 

When the song fades out, Mrs. Wheeler reaches over to turn the radio down.

“You must be looking forward to graduating,” she says, like she’s testing the waters, and Steve wishes she wouldn’t. “Not long now, is it?”

“June,” he says, to the thick red smile-wedges.

“Have you got plans?”

“Sort of.”

He’s run out of things to do with his hands so he goes to the sink, washes away the tomato wetness. The sound of the water running buys him a second, two, to gather his thoughts.

“I think I’m working for my dad in the fall? I’m still, uh. Figuring some stuff out.”

“And how _is_ your dad?”

“In Washington,” he says, and then realises that isn’t the question she asked. Missed step. Something wobbles. “Um. He’s fine? He’s there with my mom, for a conference? They called last week, everything sounded fine — they asked after you, actually. Wanted me to give you their regards?”

It all pitches up, awkward, childish.

Mrs. Wheeler passes him a dishcloth to dry his hands on, and there’s something in her expression that he doesn’t know how to translate. He’s so _tired_ of that feeling, like people hear and see more of him than he wants them to, like he’s having conversations that he can’t quite keep track of, like he keeps missing tiny fractional things that are adding up to a much bigger something that everyone else sees, everyone else knows. It’s a very lonely feeling.

“Well,” she says, and he thinks, _well_.

And then there are footsteps on the stairs, and Nancy in the doorway, saying, “ _Steve_ , I didn’t realise you were already here,” and Mrs. Wheeler saying, “oh, good, you’re down, honey, can you call the boys and tell them dinner’s ready?” and whatever the end of that sentence would have been is lost in the clatter of plates and cutlery and teenage boy noise.

They sit, and they eat, and there’s no pretending. Steve’s a guest, and it’s a different, stiffer thing to being Nancy’s boyfriend. Mrs. Wheeler is quicker to tell the boys not to bother him. Nancy looks at him and talks to him and passes him the salt, but they’re not in it together anymore, not really, and their legs don’t touch under the table. There’s more quiet than there would have been last fall, last summer.

Other things are different, too. 

Mr. Wheeler isn’t home, and although Mrs. Wheeler says, “Your father’s working late,” when Nancy looks at the empty seat, eyebrows raised, her voice is brisk and pulled rubber-band-tight. 

Nancy sort of scoffs, and Steve doesn’t know who it’s meant for, angry at her dad for whatever he’s doing, at her mom for letting him, or at both of them for being _unhappy_ and _conventional_ and _disappointing_.

He’s not sure how he’d feel if he was her, either, so maybe it’s not fair to wish she’d shut up, just shut up. But it’s a little sad, a little queasy, how Mrs. Wheeler sighs, says, “not tonight, Nancy, please,” and Nancy scoffs again, softer, just as pointed, and the kids shovel pasta into their mouths faster and faster, like they’d rather make themselves sick than have to stay at the table for another five minutes.

Steve gets it. He doesn’t get it.

He’d come here looking for something, he thinks, and it’s not here, not anymore.

~

Mrs. Wheeler sends him home with a tupperware of leftovers and an invitation to come back any time, so he has real food to eat all weekend and the sense of being thought about. 

Both are nice, though they come with a sort of aftertaste.

But the nightmares don’t stop, not for microwaved pasta or for remembered smiles, and it can’t be normal, this can’t be normal.

He’s in the Byers’ house, and the ceilings are thick with fairy lights, so thick that his brain is cutting corners and forgetting the details, the bulbs, the wires, just seeing a network of blue, pink, yellow lights. He can never remember the green, so his brain says there is no green, just electric blue, hot pink, amber streetlight yellow, tick tock, blinking out a message or just blinking. Somehow both the fairy lights and the darkness exist, and in the darkness there’s a monster, and a sound, a wet, bubbling sound like someone breathing through blood, and it’s him, or it’s the monster, and his whole body aches with the swing of the bat, the impact against something fleshy.

He’s in the Byers’ house, and there are no fairy lights, but the walls are covered in paper and the floors are covered in paper, and it isn’t a real house at all, it’s a house made of paper and Sellotape. It’s shaking in the wind, not the wind, the sound of an engine, and it’s not the house shaking, it’s him, and he’s paper, and his veins are darkly crayoned storm-cloud purple lines that join up around a hole through his middle. Billy Hargrove doesn’t smash a plate over his head, because he’s paper and the plate won’t smash, it just tears all the way down. Steve looks, in surprise, to see that he’s two halves now, and he’s saying, _no, you are,_ but all that comes out is rustling.

He’s in the tunnels and he doesn’t have enough eyes for all the little people who need him to be watching them, and everything is vines and mouths and teeth and spores that he can feel collecting in the back of his throat. He’s coughing and coughing, but words are coming out instead, _bullshit bullshit bullshit,_ and pain is pulsing through his broken face, and someone is being left behind but he can’t look back to see who. Sudden light, like fire, like headlights, and Billy Hargrove is there but his limbs are too long and his skin is white and sticky-wet looking and his face is opening opening opening to a throat with rings and rings of teeth.

He’s in his own house, and there’s a voice on the radio, saying, _like we didn’t kill Barb, like it’s great, like we’re in love and we’re partying, like we didn’t kill Barb, like it’s great, like we’re in love and we’re partying,_ but he can’t find the radio to turn it off. He’s following the sound, takes the door that should lead to his bedroom and finds himself at the pool, goes back inside, takes the door that should lead to the dining room, the pool again, and everything blue. Walks to the edge and looks down, sees jeans and a pink shirt and a thick jacket but can’t remember her face. It doesn’t matter anyway, there’s blood in the water, and it’s just a little at first, fanning over where her face should be, but then it’s coming thicker and thicker. He can still see the outline of her body but he’s dizzy dizzy dizzy, can’t fall in, the water is so hungry. There’s something in the trees.

Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.

His life feels like the stomach drop of waking up, gulping for air, skin prickling with drying sweat like something has been hovering just close enough to raise the hairs, ears, throat haunted by sounds he doesn’t remember making, over and over and over.

He goes to school because he can’t, shouldn’t, fall asleep there, but he can’t really get a grip on his days. Forgets them even as they’re happening.

His bed, his car, Big Buy, his car, school, his bed.

~ 

A storm comes on Wednesday.

It puckers up the sky, gathers it into ridges of cloud so dark and angry they look solid, charges the air with the anticipation of something explosive to come, and restlessness rustles through the cornfields and whispers across classrooms. Eyes are on windows, necks are shiver-sensitive — the first real storm of the year, and it’s descending fast.

Maybe, hopefully-maybe, Steve thinks, he’s been stirred up by the electromagnetic currents, the atmospheric pressure, the whatever, Henderson would know. 

Maybe things haven’t been normal, and it’s not his fault.

The hail starts falling during third, rattling against the windows, patchy at first then steadier and steadier and louder and louder. By lunch, the hail, the wind picking up and up and up, can be heard even at the centermost point of the school, furthest away from doors and windows. 

The students are advised over the tannoy system to _stay inside the main school building_ , to _avoid the E block classrooms, most of which have skylights that pose a health and safety risk should either the hail or wind escalate_ , to _pay close attention to further notices which will provide weather updates and, later, the protocol for leaving school_ , and, _for the love of God, to go about the rest of their scheduled days as normally as possible, with the obvious exception of some room changes, please check the bulletin in an orderly manner, thank you_. 

The air feels carbonated.

Steve wants to go outside, but there’s a whole schoolful of people to see, and to say things, and too long between now and graduation to make it worthwhile. 

But he doesn’t want to stay in the cafeteria, either, where Jonathan and Nancy are sharing a pudding pot like they couldn’t have bought one each, pushing it back and forth like there’s a difference between sharing-sharing it, and this, the pantomime of two spoons, careful boundaries. It’s probably for his benefit. It’s probably not, he’s just — he’s just. Got to go. Got to be somewhere else.

He heads for the vending machines all the way across the building, the ones next to the gym. Buying a Coke feels like a very possible thing, an easy thing, and it’ll give him something to hold. To work the tab round and round and back and forth until it snaps off.

It shouldn’t be surprising that he turns the corner and Hargrove is right there, inevitable and solid, punching in the code for a Pepsi.

_You can’t dodge me forever_ (feels frighteningly like _you can’t dodge me ever_ ).

Steve’s hand, magnetised, rises to his chest, the place where his lighter sits in his jacket pocket. The place where movie characters always keep the trinket that will, inevitably, stop the bullet meant for their heart. He’s checking it’s still there, maybe, or reminding himself of the teeth waiting to close around him, or just touching, because, all week he’s felt strangely, acutely aware of the place where Hargrove’s fingers almost were. A threat or a warning or a stray piece of punctuation suspended there, contextless, disconcerting.

The machine whirs, spits out a can, and Hargrove leans down to grab it. Turns around already lifting it, unopened.

Steve breathes in, sharp, when he sees the bruising that shadows Hargrove’s face. Echoes the breath that Hargrove takes when the cold aluminium makes contact with swollen skin. Symmetrical sucked in sounds.

Hargrove looks at him, and he looks back, and condensation gathers at the corner of Hargrove’s eye. He isn’t crying, but it’s an uncomfortable glimpse into what that might look like, a Billy Hargrove who would cry over a split lip and black eye. Sort of dazed, glassy-eyed, and much younger than Steve’s ever seen him look.

He’s never felt the year, the inch, between them before.

And then something in Hargrove shutters, soft blankness to hard blankness, the whites of his eyes and teeth unbearably white. He doesn’t have to wipe at his face for the water to become condensation again. Tears are unthinkable.

“Do you mind?” Steve says. He’s trying for forceful. It sounds like asking permission.

Hargrove steps aside either way, but not far enough that there’s much breathing space between them. Leans against the machine so that Steve is hemmed in, one arm propped above his head, the other still holding the can to his fucked up eye. That inch hasn’t gone anywhere, but still Steve feels dwarfed.

He punches in the code for a Coke, digs in his pocket for change, and Hargrove watches him without moving, breath hot and smoke-stale against the side of his face, down under his collar.

Says, while Steve slots the money in, clink, clink, “We gotta stop meeting like this,” clink, clink… ka-thunk. His tone is hard to read, and, this close, Steve can’t make sense of his face, the discrete parts of it, the expression, only the fact of it, right there, very blue eyes and very purpling skin.

“Works for me.”

Steve picks up his Coke, steps away from the ticklish, too-much feeling of Hargrove’s voice next to his ear, the way his breath and eyes and smell prickle over his skin. 

Thinks being close to Billy Hargrove is like being eroded down to nothing by how loudly he exists.

“See, I just don’t _buy_ that,” Hargrove says.

“Not trying to sell you anything.”

“Seems to _me_ ,” Hargrove says, like he’s not listening even a little, even though his eyes are fixed on Steve, “you’ve got nothing better to do. Your ex-girl does, your ex-friends do, they’re all getting theirs and hey, I’m getting mine, and what _exactly_ are you getting?”

Steve shrugs. 

“Less noise,” he says, eventually, when Hargrove doesn’t move, and the silence ticks over long enough that he’s clearly not taking apathy for an answer. Gestures at all the sickly purple, and the rest of Hargrove’s face with it. “And less of that.”

“Sounds _boring_.”

“Works for me,” Steve says again, like the fewer words he gives him, the quicker this will be over.

“ _Does_ it,” Hargrove says. His tongue flicks out, over the place where his lower lip is gritty with dried-dark blood. “You don’t look like much of anything is _working_ for you.”

Steve’s breath comes out fast, not a laugh, not-not a laugh.

“Your face is in _pieces_ ,” he says, “and you’ve got something to say about how I look?”

“I’ve got lots of somethings to say.”

Pink, insistent pink, pressing at the tender spot until the scab flakes away on his tongue and new blood wells up, wet and red.

“Shocker.”

“I can’t figure out what your _deal_ is,” Hargrove says, just as insistent. “Like. What’s your _damage_?”

If Nancy’s attention is precise, careful fingers, Steve thinks Hargrove’s could leave bruises, like a hand forcing his face towards the light and those cold-hot eyes.

Steve shrugs again. “You figure it out, let me know.”

The hand tightens, minutely, as Hargrove’s eyes narrow. 

“You’re something else, Harrington.”

_I’m not much of anything_ , Steve thinks. _I’m sick I’m tired I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. I’m not really here right now._

“Maybe.”

And Hargrove reaches out to tap the place where Steve’s lighter sits, two fingers, weirdly gentle, says, “I will, you know,” just enough to push, “I will figure it out.”

The storm energy is beginning to fizzle out under his skin, a strange, sad anticlimax. He thinks maybe he’s more afraid of Hargrove now than he’s ever been, an inch shorter, a year younger, bleeding and bruised and touching-not touching him.

“Back off, man,” he says, one step backwards, two. Feels breathless. “Stay away from me.”

He walks all the way back to the cafeteria, back to Nancy and Jonathan and the thick white noise of hail against the windows. When he cracks open his Coke, it’s lukewarm and too sweet.

~

It’s maybe not safe to drive home but everyone does it anyway, because storms happen every spring and most summers and some falls, too, and after a while life only really stops for the biggest ones. 

Still, there’s something apocalyptic about driving through streets empty of people in the semi-darkness, the way the hail-rattle swallows up the radio, the engine, even the sound of his own breathing.

Steve has to pull over at the corner of Cornwallis and Kerley, can’t even make it the last five minutes to his house, because he’s floating out of himself. He can see his hands on the wheel, but he can’t feel them anymore. He honestly might not be breathing anymore. He can’t feel _anything_.

His fingers are clumsy on the handle of the car door, and he’s tripping over his feet to get out, but at least the hail stings where it hits him, at least the fact of being hit proves he’s still a solid, feeling, hittable thing. He tilts his head forward against the force of it, presses numb fingers into his temples, and eventually, yes, there’s his pulse, blood rushing in his fingertips, at his hairline, thrumming. Feels, too, where his fingernails have pushed too hard and left slivers of bright aching behind.

Last of all comes the loosening of his lungs, all at once, the air coming in, the air coming out, like it’s always been easy.

He gets back in the car, hair wet, skin feeling almost-bruised, and drives the last five minutes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to everyone that's been patient w me & this baby of a fic -- i am only Sporadically a Person, but writing & re-writing continues to happen, slowly !

**Author's Note:**

> tell me yr thoughts in the comments or on tumblr or via tiny pieces of paper scattered to the four winds please ?
> 
> (moodboards: [one](https://oepheliawrites.tumblr.com/post/185982594646/moodboard-for-my-fic-very-near-in-place-and-time) // [two](https://oepheliawrites.tumblr.com/post/187033140596/moodboard-for-my-fic-very-near-in-place-and-time))


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